Residents worried about UCG site water quality

The Kingaroy Concerned Residents Group in southern Queensland says it is disturbing that banned chemicals continue to be found in water samples at a local underground coal gasification (UCG) site.

Cougar Energy's plant was shut down in July and the company says recent testing has detected minute traces of benzene at one bore close to the plant.

The company says it is the first positive reading in more than four hundred samples tested in the last five months and is well within national guidelines.

It says only one-part-per-billion of the chemical was found in the sample and no other bores at the site returned positive results.

Cougar Energy says water quality is still well within national guidelines.

But the Kingaroy groups' Gary Tessman says the results are worrying.

"The point of the matter is that it's still there and it is still coming out of [what] must be some kind of contamination, bearing in mind they only burned a very small amount of coal and it's been eight months since the thing was stopped," he said.